Bhopal Tragedy
The Indian Govt's explanation of this disaster doesn't sound possible for the below reasons, I have not found these discussed anywhere else on the internet and would like to know other peoples thoughts.
The Indian Governments explanation for the cause of the gas leak from the Union Carbide Plant suggests that due to various safety issues, poor maintanence and plant decay water could enter the system through a hose pipe that was connected to clean a different section of the pipe network. I have been doing some thinking and from annecdotal evidence from a variety of sources I have put together the following account.
Water was entering the system from a hose pipe connected for 4 hours. The pipe in question looks very much like a standard garden hose pipe (estimated diameter 27mm).
The water should have flowed out through four nozzles which allegedly became blocked with dirt at some point during the four hours (by the time the nozzles where checked upon they were clear again). Here for sake of simplicity I assume that the nozzles were completly blocked as the water was turned on, and so the system was closed at that end.
To reach the pipe leading to the tanks of MIC the water had to fill a pipe (estimated diameter about the size of a grown mans head, obtained from video footage) and rise 6m.
If we assume that once the water entered there was only one direction it could go and that this direction directly led to the MIC tank. The pipe leading to the tank appears to be the same diameter as the pipe about the size of a mans head (again obtained from video footage). The pipe is described as "hundreds of meters" as the crow flies the distance is around 40m, so we will take 40m as a conservative estimate of the length the water must travel before entering the system.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the reaction at Bhopal occured with hundreds of litres of water. That sounds like an extremely large amount of water to have entered the system, especially as most of the above assumptions are conservative in favour of the idea of water entering the MIC tank as suggested by the Indian Govt. What would the pressure have had to be in the Hose used to clean the pipes? It just sounds too much to me.